


Time, As a Symptom

by notabadday



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: (the original characters are just family members for fitz and jemma), F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-02
Updated: 2015-11-14
Packaged: 2018-04-29 15:22:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5132540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notabadday/pseuds/notabadday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Picking up from the end of ‘4,722 Hours’, this explores what happens when Fitz decides enough is enough and leaves S.H.I.E.L.D. after Will is rescued.</p><p>
  <i>The look on her face, sorry eyes and wobbling lip, tears him in two. It’s a neat split down the middle: to be close and to be far, to run to her and to run away. The split keeps him fixed to the spot. The spot marked ex.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fitz

**i.**

 

_ The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, _

_ Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, _

_Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;  
_

_ For nothing now can ever come to any good. _

_-_ WH Auden, Funeral Blues

He doesn’t speak because he can’t. His heart sticks in his throat threatening to choke him. The words can’t get past. The prick of her gaze on his skin pierces holes into his whole as she waits for answers that don’t come.

 Her tears crash over him in heavy waves but he feels frail, no match for the cruel current. Bile fills his mouth in the place of a reply. He looks to the ground, inviting it to swallow him.

 To look back at her would give away too much, secrets bare in the depth of his ocean eyes. He wonders where he used to bury them. Where did those hiding places go?

 Fitz hasn’t the strength to comfort her. To place his hand on her shoulder would only shake her like it shakes him. His pain burns with hers and his mixed together, and the water from their eyes only fuels the flames, their grease fire love spreading its threat from present to past and future. The corners of sepia-tone photograph memories turn black and melt away, while days to come hide behind a cornfield of flames so high that he can’t see clear.

 In determined strides, he moves to his lab – _their_ lab – and covers the task in the lie that it’s her rescue unresolved. Those same files, research in a hundred languages he’s half-learned in six months and graphs marking frequency of recorded incidents involving alternating matter objects, reappear on the desktop as he punches in that five-key shortcut that locks and unlocks.

 He’s saving Jemma Simmons. A different kind of rescue, sure, but he never could turn down an opportunity to play her hero. The role fit like a glove.

 “We’re gonna get him back,” he promises her, time enough bought for his voice to deliver it.

 The look on her face, sorry eyes and wobbling lip, tears him in two. It’s a neat split down the middle: to be close and to be far, to run to her and to run away. The split keeps him fixed to the spot. The spot marked ex.

 Fitz watches her pain sprout tears but the battle to repress his own paralyses him; he can’t move to her, he can’t move at all.

 

**ii.**

 

_ We may be just _

_ two different clocks _

_ that do not tock _

_ in unison. _

\- Lang Leav, Some Time Out

 

He does it almost too easily. The pain rips off like a band-aid. It’s quick. Once it’s done, relief comes. Relief because he’s saved her and he’s saved her again, and now he might just build a life raft for himself.

 On a night when he knows Will is with the new counselor, the not-Andrew drone who concedes to Coulson on every score, Fitz knocks on Jemma’s door. His hands are empty and in the pause before her response, he kicks himself for his lack of preparation but knows deep down that unsteady hands only spill tea.

 She breathes his name.

 He thinks about Will and the relief of a quick hand and decides not to let the silence germinate. “I wanted to tell you in person that I’m leaving.”

 “For how long?” she asks, her voice as fragile as he feels.

 “For good. I can’t-” He shakes his head, struggling to articulate himself. “I can’t do this anymore. I want to see my mum. I want to see sunlight.”

 She gives that same tearful nod he saw in the lab after his promise: accepting and admiring and heartbroken, if he still knows how to read her. It tears him in two but the pieces aren’t so even anymore; the impulse to run moves him to turn his back and walk steadily down the hall to the last of his packing. It’s the packing he can’t stomach: the things that could just as easily belong to her, or did, before she wrapped them in a bow and placed them in his hands.

 When his departure time arrives, his parting words are, “Be happy.” And he gives a goodbye smile, the kind she’s seen only once before.

 Fitz thinks about her on planes, trains and automobiles, and faces the prospect of perhaps never thinking about anything else. He wonders if distance can save him, or if it’s too late to hope. He never questions that it was worth it, though, pushing into extra time to grant her last request. She has her will: her Will.

 His thoughts are so consumed by what he’s leaving behind instead of what lies ahead, it’s not until the taxi from the airport to his house that he contemplates his lack of warning. The assumption that his mother will welcome him with arms wide open suddenly feels optimistic.

 When he arrives on her doorstep, she sweeps him up in her warmth without hesitation, thick wool and love encasing his brittle heart in bubble wrap. That’s when he cries. He curls into her embrace and once the first sob escapes, the rest burst out of him.

 “Leo,” Judy gasps, rubbing his back to calm him like she would when he was a child.

 She guides him inside a home he barely remembers. The photographs on the mantelpiece have multiplied since his last visit. In every graduation picture that his mother’s picked out, he’s outshined by the luminous smile of Jemma Simmons. That’s a conversation for another day. He’s exhausted.

 After a soothing cup of Yorkshire Tea, delivered to him in a monkey mug he hasn’t seen for years, Fitz makes his excuses and disappears upstairs to a room decorated for a young boy who loves the mysteries of the universe more than any girl.

 

 **iii.**  

 

_ There’s an old trick played, _

_ when the light and the wine conspire _

_ to make me think I’m fine. _

_ I’m not, but I have got half a mind _

_ to maybe get there, yet. _

\- Joanna Newsom, The Things I Say

 

One of each season comes between them: blossoms and droughts and leaves until snow. Time stretches out and he begins to wonder if perhaps loving a little less, on balance, might be a better way to live. Euphoric highs don’t soften crushing lows, he decides. Better to live in the middle, just like everybody else. Self-preservation proves a more attainable goal than happiness.

 He lets time lie to him. He lets time soften the edges of their story. Even when he looks at her picture now, the bruises come up a little less blue. (He never did talk to his mother about that mantelpiece of memories.)

 Fitz deftly navigates a new life, a new job at the local university occupying most of his time. He’s grateful for the way it eats up his weeks. It stops him from counting them as they pass.

The confidence he developed over the course of his time working for S.H.I.E.L.D. serves him well in his new role, though his aptitude for teaching seems, in many ways, innate. Academic experience is the least of his virtues. His lectures achieve record attendance and he modestly puts it down to novelty, oblivious to the way his students marvel at him and neglect to ask a single thing of his colleagues. As his hours finish, they loiter in circles around his lectern. They overload him with complex questions about the theory of the day, while the mysteries of his trembling hands and sad eyes continue to plague them. He grows out thick stubble, ageing him enough that his youth doesn’t undermine his professional authority, but they respect him for a thousand reasons that have nothing to do with facial hair.

 Emails from Bobbi burn a hole in his inbox. It’s one of few traces of a former life that remain. There are the emails, decorated with the S.H.I.E.L.D. letterhead that Coulson just can’t let go of, and there is the ambiguously disguised splinter bomb that he carries at the bottom of a satchel, his singular defense against old demons that threaten his idyll.

 Bobbi’s messages are ever more infrequent. She writes of missing him, of wishing he was there, of wondering how he is. His replies are terse. They never invite word of Jemma. He wants the best for her, that’s genuine, but he can’t bear to know what that’s made up of, imagining romantic montages of his best friend and her spaceman traversing the world hand-in-hand without the burden of Leo Fitz. The moving pictures in his mind play on so large a screen that it doesn’t leave room for the possibility of anything else.

 “Everyone here misses you,” Bobbi signs off every time, leaving him to wonder who she means by “everyone”. Is it Jemma? Is it her spaceman? He wishes the thought didn’t taste so bitter.

 Fitz opts not to ask. He returns her email with a friendly acknowledgement before starting an essay-length reply to a favorite student, pouring in criticism and kindness in equal measure.

 

**iv.**

 

_ He cannot tell her how the open night _

_ swings like a door without her, _

_ how he is the lock _

_and she is the key._

\- Robin Robertson, Static

 

Posters of a familiar face papered across the city pique his curiosity. She looks just like Jemma – those same full eyebrows, full lips – but these eyes are green. He hasn’t seen the youngest Simmons sister since the last birthday Jemma celebrated at sci-ops – a lifetime ago. She looks exactly how he remembers: unkempt brunette fringe, thin-framed tortoiseshell glasses and flea market clothes that shouldn’t work in combination but somehow do.

 The date on the poster is the following Wednesday: soon and free. It draws him in. He strolls into the booking office and inquires.

 “Will that be two tickets, sir?” the friendly woman behind glass asks him with a tired customer service smile and glazed eyes.

 “No, no, just the one,” he replies before cheerfully adding, “Friend of the band.”

 She seems impressed by this but it turns his cheeks pink. It had fallen out before he could catch it. _Friend of the band?_ Barely true. The boast is a mix of pride and wishful thinking, but he chastises himself for it.

 Fitz contemplates ripping the ticket in two and forgetting all about it. He can’t forget, though. It connects him to the Jemma he aches for. So he goes.

 He makes sure to arrive a little late so he can hide at the back, ensuring a limited view across the modest venue – a marked step up from the last place he saw Isabel Simmons perform. Like the poster, the stage is just how he remembers: her tasseled old rug, a harpist and her harp.

 Fitz listens, enraptured by songs filled with nautical metaphors and mellifluous strumming. Intricate lyrics steal stories from the sister he knows, disguised as artistic analogy: a heart in a box buried in the seabed and the cartographer of constellations. He wonders how much Izzy knows, how much Jemma’s told her. As her fingers dance over the elaborate instrument’s silver strings, left hand plucking bass, right hand plucking melody, he begins to believe she might just know every secret of the universe.

 The music transports him back to the first time he ever saw Izzy play. Jemma’s whole family had been there, and she’d brightly introduced her sibling as the right-brain to her left-brain. Beth, their eldest sister, had nodded along with a Simmons smile, prompting him to ask, “What does that make Beth?”

 In unison, the three sisters had lightly replied: “No brain!” and laughed together as though it was an old joke they’d been telling all their lives. Maybe it was.

 Fitz fills with envy at the memory. The silence of a lonely childhood made the lively rapport of her family a strange social adjustment. Laughter had flown the coop with his father’s health. But Jemma had taught him to adapt. Out of nights filled with silly sitcoms and terrible cooking and the mispronunciation of new scientific terms, she had given him back his laugh.

 It’s gone now, he realizes as tears tickle his cheeks.

 The morsels of truth that the chanteuse shares with her audience pull at Fitz’s heartstrings until eventually the frame of him can’t take anymore and those strings come loose. He escapes the suffocating closeness of the concert, outside air rushing his lungs with oxygen.

 Fitz decides not to go back in for the rest of the show. What good can it do? He resigns himself to an evening of Planet Earth documentaries and the M&S dinner-for-one that’s on its last edible day.

 ‘A Monkey’s Tale’ is almost over when his quiet evening alone is disrupted by a firm knock at the door. It wakes him from a shallow sofa slumber well past midnight but he quickly jumps up to answer it, keen to prevent the disturbance of his sleeping mother.

 The door opens to a face he doesn’t expect. For one suffocating moment, it’s Jemma, until he snaps back to reality and finds only her younger sister. Izzy stands on the doorstep smiling, with an eagerness to her disposition that he finds unsettling.

 “Well, Leo Fitz, as I live and breathe,” she declares, her Yorkshire accent as thick as ever. “Long time, no see.”

 “Izzy.” He greets her warmly, a hug coming easy to him but as a surprise to her.

 She waits awkwardly for him to invite her inside before tightening her grip on the neck of a wine bottle and lifting it up for his attention. “I brought wine.”

 Fitz winces.

 “I’ll drink the wine then,” Izzy replies cheerfully, marching past him in the doorway. “Come on, Doc. Time for a catch-up.”

 He’s not surprised to discover she already knows the story.

 “What hurts the most,” he confesses after a few glasses of red, “is that I know no matter how long I was out there, I couldn’t love anybody else. She doesn’t feel the way I do.” 

Izzy’s middle parting has been disheveled, her fingers having moved it into a tousled heap atop her head amidst a great deal of gesticulating. When she shakes her head, it prompts her fringe to fall loose of the mess. “Fitz, you’re looking at it all wrong.”

 He’s affronted but curious.

 “You’re a romantic. You’re the hero ready to fall on your sword for the woman you love, always so ready to die for her.” There isn’t an opening for Fitz to argue before she gets to the point. “Jemma’s a pragmatist. While you’re ready to die for her, she’s the one keeping you alive. She’ll do anything to survive. You know why?”

 He does. It makes his heart drop like someone opened a trap door inside of him.

 Izzy watches him understand. “If _she_ doesn’t survive, she knows you won’t.”

 

**v.**

 

_ (i do not know what it is about you that closes _

_ and opens;only something in me understands _

_ the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) _

_nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands_

\- e.e. cummings, ‘somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond’

 

‘Isabel Simmons: Live in London’ titles an automated email that finds its way into his inbox, interrupting the steady flow of student queries and e-receipts. Despite the distance from Glasgow to London, he doesn’t hesitate. There are questions he’s at last ready to ask and they’re too delicate for transatlantic emails. Izzy has a distant knowledge of all things, as proved by their last encounter. He trusts her because she’s a duplicate of Simmons that hasn’t broken his heart; the simulacrum, the not-quite, dilutes the power and the pain while still satisfying his yearning just a little.

 The pull of Jemma Simmons is the fifth and strongest fundamental force of nature. That’s his scientific assessment anyway.

 He books a train, a hotel room and a ticket over a cheese and pickle sandwich, crumbs burying in the grooves of his keyboard. The colleague with whom he shares an office blinks pointedly in irritation as keen fingers crash hard against keys.

 For once, Fitz finds cause to mark his calendar. He looks forward to tales of Jemma’s scientific successes and, at long last, feels ready to know exactly how she is, Will or no Will. Or so he convinces himself.

 When he arrives at the concert hall, he wanders in slowly, admiring the old-fashioned aesthetic that so precisely fits with Izzy’s sensibility.There are echoes of artistic historical references sprawling up walls and across the barrel vault ceiling. There’s something churchlike about it, and looking at the rest of the crowd, Fitz deems worship an accurate descriptor of their behavior. When she appears, as though ex nihilo, Izzy’s antediluvian instrument and the mystical sounds she draws from it do nothing to quash his reading of the scene. Her audience appears spellbound, blankness in their expressions as they move in subtle sways to the song. Fitz moves between them to find a spot before settling at the edge of the upper level. That’s when he sees Jemma; she’s situated exactly opposite, right of the stage, at the border of tiers.

 The stab he feels in his chest, faced with her for the first time in over a year, brings out a laugh. It’s dry and humorless but really, he thinks, it’s funny that he ever supposed he might move on. The year separating them disappears. The pictures that decorate his mother’s lounge can’t compare to the real thing – _if this is the real thing_. He wonders if perhaps she’s a cruel hallucination, summoned by bewitching melody, drawing him into a revelatory trance. Jemma’s cheeks glisten with streaks of half-dried tears under dim stage lighting, but the luster of her skin casts doubt over her authenticity; he suspects her presence is reverie. The vision of her shines in a perfection too fantastical to be real.

 There or not there, and he never was very good at knowing, it’s now that he realizes he’s set her free in the hope that one day she’ll come back to him. Despite his long-standing efforts towards self-preservation, he slips and falls into renewed hope.

 When Bobbi says “everyone misses you”, she means Jemma. He’s suddenly so sure of it. Jemma, only Jemma.

 As he watches her smile, he knows it’s magic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is a direct result of all of the ‘4,722 Hours’ feelings combined with non-stop listening to Joanna Newsom’s new album, ‘Divers’. It’s as conceptual as I’ve gone with fic but I wanted to explore the relationship between Fitz and Simmons in isolation; outside of S.H.I.E.L.D., where, emotionally, do they go from here? That also factored in to the choice to use original characters instead of Daisy and Bobbi. And I’m just very interested in Fitz and Simmons' backgrounds.
> 
> Re: Jemma's sister, I liked the idea that she would be similarly talented but in a totally different field so I took that idea and ran with it.
> 
> I hope you don’t feel shortchanged by the lack of Simmons but the second chapter will hopefully make up for that.


	2. Jemma

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for waiting patiently for Chapter 2. I hope it provides a satisfying conclusion. Enjoy!

**vi.**

 

_ Your love I once surrendered, _

_ has never left my mind. _

\- Lang Leav, Always With Me

 

The plagiarism of her story is so transparent, Jemma finds herself admiring the boldness of her sister’s theft. Truths are veiled under presupposed fantasy; the reality too weighted in abstract imagination to ever capture belief. She considers feeling exploited but can’t quite muster it. There’s relief in the beauty that her sister exhumes from old tales of dark, ugly horrors.

 Months of missing Fitz flood her mind like at last a dam has broken, wearing down her stoic repression of feeling to bring about release: a rush of tears bursting from her seams without impediment. Hidden in a crowd, half of whom weep in their own private reflection of the song, she is free of self-consciousness. Who can spot her tears in a river whose banks are breaking?

 She is uninhibited, making no attempt to wipe or halt her tears but instead embracing them, letting herself paddle along the current rather than fighting against it. She’s done enough fighting. She’s bone-tired.

 While melodies loaded with him bring on that old, familiar ache, a strange feeling of closeness comes with it. It’s the closest she’s felt to him since he packed up her heart into a battered old suitcase and walked away. The music deludes her into believing that wherever he is, the sound might carry the million miles between them and tell him all that she can never articulate – because of timing, because of fear, because the English language doesn’t span the size of it. Maybe he’ll listen to thinly veiled references to underwater admissions and hear his pain reflected in hers.

 Jemma thinks about the letters she’s written to him: messy and muddled and never quite brave enough to say outright what she really means. They get lost in “How are you?” and “I read that you’re a professor now, is that right?” and “I bet you’re so good at that, Fitz!” and never encroach on territory like “Come back” or “Will’s gone” or “I ache for you”. Jemma feels everything she feels with such a heaviness that it impedes her ability to express herself.

 It’s only realized as she hears Izzy’s harp play those ineffable feelings back to her: her heartache has been an unsolvable word search. Analogies and similes and wordplay could never cut it; none of it can adequately convey the depth of what runs between them. No wonder every draft of her letters and speeches ends up in the trash.

 How can she ever begin to tell him what he means to her? “I love you” is so exhausted by overuse. “Maybe there is” had been her inadvertent synonym. No less direct than “More than that”, she considers.

Fitz’s feelings are always transparent while still strangely undefined, never directly worded. His poker face is so poor, words might simply have cheapened the message already received loud and clear. It’s in his eyes and his tone and the way he would touch her like she’s a precious stone. His words are imbued with the same ambiguity as hers and yet she is so profoundly moved by his love.

 As the song falls into an instrumental interlude, her thoughts drift into wondering, optimistically, whether she might someday earn a second chance.

 

**vii.**

_ Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, _

_ But bears it out even to the edge of doom. _

\- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

 

The curtain comes down and the house lights come up. It brings the room out of a harp-induced trance and the crowd begins shuffling towards a single exit without delay, bodies barricading Jemma’s path to the back of the venue. She makes herself small and weaves slowly through the masses, her direction pushing against a heavy tide.

 When she arrives at the dressing room, unmistakable with its glittering ‘Izzy’ name plaque that her sister had crafted the previous afternoon in lieu of anything professional, Izzy almost charges at her as soon as the door creaks ajar. Her eyes are wide and animated; it would be terrifying were Jemma not rather used to her sister’s colorful expressions.

 “Fitz was here,” Izzy blurts out urgently. The sigh of relief for having survived the impossible crowd never gets breathed before she’s inhaling Izzy’s revelation, her chest tightening at the sound of his name. That beautiful word. _Oh, Fitz_.

 “No,” Jemma replies with uncertainty. “What?”

 Her sister’s tone drops its urgency, replacing agitation with a concerned softness that more appropriately fits the delicacy of their circumstance. “In the audience. I saw him. Stage right.”

 Skeptical, she asks, “Are you sure?”

 “I know you’re still on draft number 59 of your Fitz speech but can I strongly suggest you grab the bull by the horns and go with whatever you’ve got so far,” Izzy advises, sincerity blending with feather-light teasing. She watches Jemma’s hands cover her face, unease spreading through her expression. “We both know he didn’t come here for _me_ , sis.”

 “All we do is hurt each other,” Jemma says timidly. It’s so barely audible above the hubbub of the venue, but Izzy’s listening intently, refusing to let a single syllable escape her attention.

 “It’s all just… timing.”

 Jemma nods. “You sound like Daisy. And Bobbi. And Hunter.”

 “Pretty obvious to everyone except you two. Besides, what have you got to lose? You’re already hurting,” Izzy points out with a bluntness to which Jemma has become accustomed.

 “Yeah but it’s that numb kind of pain that you just get used to after a while,” she lies. “And what if _he’s_ not hurting anymore and I ruin that for him.”

 “That boy won’t ever get over you, Jemma. The way you love him, the way you can’t talk about anything else for more than half a sentence before it becomes about him, he’s always been the same. Loving him back would be a mercy. For us all.” Izzy sighs, a weariness about the situation setting in as she watches Jemma’s tearful eyes dodge contact. “Find him. Do whatever. It’s Fitz.”

 There’s that stabbing pain again.

 “You should see the look on your face, dummy,” Izzy adds, her expression warming to a grin.

 

**viii.**

 

_ Time passed hard, _

_ and the task was the hardest thing she’d ever do. _

_ But she forgot, _

_ the moment she saw you. _

\- Joanna Newsom, Time, As a Symptom

 

The day after her sister’s show and the unsubstantiated claims of a Fitz sighting, Jemma pencils in a lecture by one of her favorite speakers – a balding man with a predilection for conversational tangents. He had often given biochem talks during Jemma’s academy days, inviting whole new trains of thought to her study of living organisms. Young Simmons had always been a teacher’s pet, thanks to her ability to unpack even the most demanding ideas without the need for clarification or intervention. As Dr McCarthy would recite long speeches about complex schematics, everyone else would groan inwardly as Jemma lit up. She feels a distracting buzz about reuniting with her former mentor as his successful, young wunderkind.

 Revisiting her glory days is perhaps an indulgence. In fact, she knows it is. A thousand mysteries sit waiting on her desk back at the base, sand trickling through the old egg timer inside her mind. None of it can wait.

 Jemma’s plan is to only stay in London a handful of days but the fixture fits neatly into a hole in her short schedule. She’s optimistic that a morning filled with science, even if it is rehashing aged material that lags behind her own discoveries, might distract from the Fitz-sized hole in her life. She continues to cling to hope that something might. It hasn’t yet. All those somethings ever do is pull him back into her thoughts.

 Fitz had always hated Dr. McCarthy’s lectures. Jemma fondly recalls many mornings spent fuelling her best friend with tea and biscuits in blatant and unashamed attempts to bribe him into keeping her company. He would gripe the whole way there, list a thousand better things he could be doing with his hour, and then she’d turn and smile brightly only to see him still under her gaze. Protestations would die away and by the time they found their seats, he’d be leaning over to draw his signature doodle of a monkey on the bottom corner of her notepaper, imperceptibly different to the one on the previous page, as they waited for the lecture to start.

 Fitz’s face would contort as projections of dissected cadavers appeared on the overhead that McCarthy had clung to since the mid-nineties, as the professor spoke methodically of the biological study that each image pertained to. McCarthy focused on the intricacies of each topic and that slow, monotone drawl of his would have sent Fitz to sleep every time if it weren’t for those stone-hard seats.

 She remembers each of those lectures ending with an offer to buy him lunch, always the way to Fitz’s heart. They would wander into the cafeteria and peruse a thousand options before landing on their usual: prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella sandwiches, never as good as Jemma’s homemade ones, and a bag of Lays. Somewhere around his third or fourth potato chip, he’d ritualistically run to the bathroom having flashed back to McCarthy’s nauseating material. It happened more times than she could count.

 Jemma knew all too well that Fitz only ever went along for her benefit. His pretence of reluctance had grown increasingly weak and by the end of their time at the academy, he barely muttered unwillingness at all.

 Daydreams of him fill her mind as she settles into a middle row, neither too keen nor too cool. She isn’t in the mood to get drawn into a tête-à-tête with her old professor and hides herself amidst the crowd of likeminded intellectuals. Jemma pulls out her notebook and subconsciously plays with the blank corners of pages, the friction causing them to curl.

 Then she sees him. At least, it looks like him. Not McCarthy. _Fitz_. She doesn’t know she has the back of his head memorized until it’s there, almost certainly, three rows in front, short curls of dark blonde and a hand resting around his neck to hold him up straight.

 She can’t make sense of it. He only ever went to Dr McCarthy’s lectures for her. _He only ever went for her._

 

**ix.**

 

_ Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, _

_ Old time is still a-flying. _

\- Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

 

The first time she gets a good look at his face, they’re at opposite ends of the canteen. He’s alone. Rolled-up sleeves and relaxed stubble remind her of her first crush: a shy substitute physics teacher she remembers fondly, the memory drawing out a smile. That lost look he wears reminds of her first love: a smart, handsome boy who wore colorful shirts and never looked himself when she wasn’t by his side.

 She bites her lip. He’s beautiful, like every earlier version of him was a draft of this one. It catches in her throat. He’s better than she remembers. They had once discussed attractiveness as a bell curve, but looking at him across that room, she hypothesizes no decline on his horizon.

 Jemma’s determined not to let him disappear again and charges assertively through small clusters of people that block her path. Her eyes keep on him the whole time and as soon as she’s closed the gap, she abruptly says, “I love you” like it’s hello. It was _meant_ to be hello.

 His jaw drops open a little before clenching.

 “Sorry!” she corrects herself in a burst of awkward energy. “I didn’t mean- well, yeah, I did. I did mean… _that_. You’re here and I love you. And I said it again.” Jemma curses herself under her breath and doesn’t see the faint smile pulling at his lips. “It’s just that I’m…” she sighs, “in love with you, is the thing.” 

 Fitz’s eyes sparkle with tears.

 “Are you okay? Do you want me to stop?” Jemma swallows a mouthful of bile, looking up and watching him turn back into the young boy her fragile heart remembers best. “Izzy told me she saw you last night, and I thought maybe… maybe you were here for me. It’s stupid.”

 “You love me?”

 “I, umm…” Her hand flusters over her forehead. “I’m only halfway through a pretty mediocre draft of… You know. Don’t you know? I can’t find the right words, Fitz, but you must know.”

 She watches his chest heave and blinks away her own tears, suddenly all too aware of them having appeared. Fitz is quiet and unreadable and he’s not looking at her until all of a sudden he is. “You love me,” he exhales.

 “What… do you think we should do about it?” she asks nervously, eyes studying his for clues, any warning for what emotion is about to break her clean in half. She knows Fitz well enough to know he needs obvious; he needs it spelt out. But she balances that with the crushing fear of forcing something upon him that he no longer wants. It’s been a year. “Can you forgive me?”

 Fitz looks as though the lightest wind could knock him flat.

 “You didn’t…” he starts. “You were always… brilliant. I let you down when I left. I left for me, and-”

 “That’s the only thing you’ve _ever_ done for yourself, Fitz.” She says it in a laugh. _Ridiculous man_. “In all the time I’ve known you. I love you for that.” Jemma shakes her head. “I didn’t mean to say it again, it just keeps falling out. It’s like when we had to lie to Weaver about getting sick just so we could get out of our seminar to go to that science convention and I kept listing symptoms. I couldn’t stop! Remember? And in the end, I’d diagnosed so many ailments that she called the nurse in to check on us and, well, we were both in _very_ hot water after that.” She pauses. “Now that I’m saying it, it doesn’t sound that similar.”

 “Jemma,” he says, simple and heavy.

 “Yes.”

 His fingers brush lightly across her cheek. Subconsciously, her face tilts upwards to his. It’s an irrefutable invitation. Her eyes don’t leave room for any confusion; the message is clear, his actions almost a reflex. He kisses her full on the mouth with hands pulling them tight together, bodies pressed parallel. It’s more confident than Jemma anticipates. It’s not foreshadowed by a slow lean, or hard and fast; it’s a perfect medium, the kind of kiss that suggests a thousand others have preceded it.

 When they part, her hands move in slow strokes down his shoulders with a firmness that limits their separation. He shines under harsh fluorescent tube lighting. It would expose flaws if there were any.

 Noticing the luster of her lip-gloss, she moves a thumb across his lips to remove it. The way his eyes watch her, intense and curious and wanting, pulls her back in. She moves a hand into his hair, carelessly disturbing its tidy state, and presses her lips to his once again. This time, their lips part and the kiss deepens, prompting disapproving whispers from the onlookers neither one of them has noticed.

 When again they pause in reluctant pursuit of the oxygen necessary to sustain them, Fitz whispers breathlessly into her hair: “I missed you.”

 She trails kisses across one side of his face.

 “There aren’t words for how deeply I love you, Fitz,” Jemma reiterates, grateful that she has her second chance, “but if there were, I’d never stop saying them.”

 He breathes out his disbelief before shyly rolling his eyes a little to thwart further tears. Jemma’s gaze is fixed on him, watching happiness permeate his expression as he begins to finally, _finally_ , believe it.

 

**x.**

 

_ And it pains me to say, I was wrong. _

_ Love is not a symptom of time. _

_ Time is just a symptom of love. _

 \- Joanna Newsom, Time, As a Symptom

 

When he tentatively asks Jemma to pinpoint the moment she fell in love with him, disguising vulnerable curiosity behind playful teasing, she cheerfully relays the truth of it: their time together has endured because it began in love, and the love endured. Seeds grew to surplus. It had once been manageable, imperceptible in the background of extraordinary professional achievements. But a decade had rearranged the scene, and feeling now dominated the fore, rendering them both rather less able to repress it.

 Science is so utterly mundane when compared to the look in his eye when he knows she’s about to kiss him. That’s about all the extraordinary that Jemma Simmons wants. Between languid bed kisses in a modest South London hotel room, she tells him, “Let’s have ordinary days first.” Her words come out a promise.

 “Ordinary?” An alien concept.

 Jemma resets her head against his chest to move a disobeying lock of hair out of her face. “We can be normal.”

 “I’m not sure we can,” he replies wryly.

 There’s a roll of her eyes that Fitz doesn’t catch before she twists to look up at him, resting her chin where her cheek had been. As her eyes capture his, she notices the effect it has on him. His Adam’s apple gives away a gulp. The line of his lips widens ever so slightly. He tenderly moves a finger to re-tuck her hair behind her ear.

 “Let’s eat pancakes and binge-watch medical dramas full of inaccuracies.” And then she remembers he already has some version of ordinary, a life he’s been building for over a year. “Can I sit in on one of your lectures?”

 “No chance, no, but you _could_ be a guest speaker,” he says, eagerness widening keen eyes. “The students would fall over themselves with questions for you.”

 “Questions about their favorite lecturer,” she teases. Fitz shakes his head as she continues: “‘Is Fitz single?’ and ‘When did Fitz get so handsome?’ That kinda thing. I bet they all have big crushes on you.”

 He crinkles his nose and breaks from their locked gaze. Jemma soothes his embarrassment by affectionately caressing a hand to one blushing cheek.

 “Am I going to have competition?”

 Fitz gives a dry laugh. “No.”

 She grins before pulling herself up a little to kiss him, his sweet reward. When she pulls away, her face lingers over his as she studies his expression; nerves remain, happiness brushing up against the terrifying fear that that same happiness might ever leave them.

 The silence brings him to ask, “Is that where you want to go? Scotland?”

 She shrugs, the gesture creating a stirring friction between their bare bodies. “I go where you go.”

 A hand that had been preoccupied with mussing already disheveled bed hair moves gently down her back. Their bodies press parallel together without the obstruction of clothes. It’s the closest they’ve ever been – in every possible sense. The moment is slow and quiet, a world of intrusions entirely forgotten. They aren’t kissing. They aren’t talking. Instead, they gaze at one another, desire and contentment mixing together in mirroring expressions.

 That is until, on opposing bedside tables, two phones ring in perfect time. The same single ring.

 They share a groan, Jemma’s head bowing to rest on Fitz’s shoulder, before they both grudgingly roll outwards to matching devices to discover the same message from their former boss: “0-8-4. We need you.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The whole story arranged itself around the last excerpt I used (“Time is just a symptom of love”) and the ideas it presents. Time is such a prominent theme in their relationship: bad timing, running out of time, personal history, memory, etc. I feel like focusing on the endurance of their relationship allows my heart a little relief. It endures because of the love between them. In that sense, they’ll always have time. 
> 
> The other reference I don't make directly but certainly had in mind during this chapter was that line from 'Emma': "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more." It always feels fitting with Fitz and Simmons because expressions of love have always been coded, rather than direct, within the canon thus far. It's always transcended the limits of language in a really beautiful way. 
> 
> And re: the ending, I wanted to leave you with some narrative control. If you want them to go off and live contentedly in Glasgow, giving lectures to fangirl-or-boying students then you can enjoy that ending. I do really like imagining these kids creating backstories for Fitz having seen all these little quirks and the sadness his eyes carry, and then later meeting Jemma in some guest lecture and it suddenly being so obvious that she's the person he's loved all that time because, my god, the way he smiles at her as he gives her introduction. On the other hand, if you want Fitzsimmons back with the team, you can choose that for them. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed the whole thing, and please let me know your thoughts if you have a chance. Thanks for reading!


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